“... pessimism. A very different mood could also be found in Enlightenment Britain, as austerity and self-denial, those old-fashioned Protestant virtues, succumbed to what Samuel Johnson extolled as the ‘innocent pleasures’ of money-making. Acquisitive ‘passions’ previously condemned as venal and anti-social were revalued as ‘interests’, while ...”

“... previous books, which are populated by flat, chronically miserable characters who repeat the same self-defeating and often viscerally revolting actions over and over again, and feature endings that seem determined to mock and disappoint.‘A writer needs some direction,’ Vesta tells herself in an extended dialogue with the mystery-writing advice page,some ...”

“... global war and double-think acts of terrorism have very nearly erased the line once drawn between self-mastery and self-indulgence. The line was once an enviable statement of human potential against the historical background of centuries of cruel behaviour. Slowly and painfully there occurred a change in manners which ...”

“... the embodiment of Thatcherism, a man who has risen from the ranks of the poor and whose belief in self-help and the virtues of the free market is unshakable. The simultaneous publication of their memoirs therefore affords an interesting X-ray picture of Mrs Thatcher’s governments and of a Tory Party which has altered radically under Thatcher and ...”

“... accounts. The principal exception is at the other extreme: Hannah Arendt’s rebarbative, self-indulgent biography of Rahel Varnhagen, the most celebrated of these Jewish hostesses. Hertz dutifully mentions and a few times cites, Arendt’s book in passing and then moves on. What she moves on to is other historians and a generous sampling of social ...”

“... an ‘enlarged forum for experience and exploration’ where the young could be enticed from their self-preoccupations by exposure to varieties of otherness, and in so doing effect their passage from adolescence to adulthood. The unzoned and permeable ‘survival community’ Sennett sketched in 1970 was intended to show how an ‘integration of ...”

“... way his generation is going; what he hasn’t got is a language to make us sit up and listen. Will Self’s idiolect is more inventive than Bracewell’s; the suavely metaphorical turn of his prose and the yawning insolence of his tone are far more captivating. But Cock & Bull has none of Bracewell’s amiability. It consists of two novellas, the one the ...”

“... is at once subject and object of his or her narrative, a fissured soul striving impossibly for self-coincidence, for that magical moment when the writing subject and the subject written of will merge into an imaginary whole. The prototype of this process is Oedipus, the detective in pursuit of the criminal who is himself. Michael Owen starts out as the ...”

“... and personality, is somehow more reassuring and constant than her relation to her own remembered self. Mirror Writing discussed dandyism and style informally, as one of the ways in which identity is constructed. Adorned in Dreams continues and considerably extends this discussion in much more concrete terms. The book is, as she says, an attempt ‘to view ...”

“... flirtations. Their political compromises, endlessly reviewed, may have exhibited naivety or self-regard. But much of that record is still educative, and the argument did take place under real pressure from anti-semitic and authoritarian enemies. Today, the alleged ‘neo-conservative’ movement around Jeane Kirkpatrick, Commentary and the New Criterion ...”

“... its influence on western thinking. In the latter, she suggested that to be human is ‘To name the self, the world, and God’, and that this power of naming has been stolen from women, now as much as in the Adamic myth. Gyn/Ecology extends that argument and is, as she says of its title, ‘a way of wrenching back some word-power’. This involves linguistic ...”

“... in fostering a new, virulently anti-Soviet ‘politics of interest’ – or, some would say, self-interest. I’d also heard that he was becoming very fierce about gays, dykes and nukes – indeed, any new or fashionable grouping that got in the way of the immediate and pressing task of rebuilding American morale. It was easy to see, then, that he was ...”

“... that achieved that must be celebrating its triumph; why won’t it let me join in? [Of his self-hatred] This opinion is my only good point. [Of suicide] If you were capable of it, you certainly wouldn’t need it. [Of the TB which was to kill him] It’s a special illness which has been, if you like, conferred preferentially, quite unlike any ...”

“... to give us an account of ourselves. The nub of Taylor’s position is the claim that man is a ‘self-interpreting animal’. One way in which a human agent differs from other animals is by the possession of a conception of himself, an understanding of who he is and what he is doing. An agent’s self-understanding is not ...”

“... unity at times of crisis for being both apolitical and personal. By drawing to his or her fallible self a lot of the popular enthusiasm that might otherwise be bestowed on charismatic vote-winners, the monarch has helped to prevent the emergence of Caesarist dictatorships of various kinds. During the Second World War, while Hitler projected his power through ...”